As a class, the children in our Opal 2 community are asked to form relationships with each other by virtue of being members of the classroom. These relationships evolve over the course of the year, some new, some renewed from previous years. Some children form deep connections, some children work through great struggles. Being aware of the value of the relationships that every person in a community has with every other person is something that we believe is essential for a community to thrive.
We wanted to give the children an opportunity to consider how relationships are formed, is it the same for everyone? Is it the same for every time? In sharing their ideas with each other, the children are able to consider each other’s experience. Connecting with one another around common experiences offers to the children the opportunity to see themselves in someone else’s thinking or conversely, to see through a classmate’s eyes a perspective that alone, they might not have considered.
We invited the children to work with a partner to reflect on these relationships using line and color. We asked, “How can you describe what it is like to form a relationship? How does it happen? What emotions do you feel? What changes occur?”
“There were two towns. One town is all peaceful and one is all angry. One especially sunny day a person from the blue town goes to the red town and is all nice. This makes the red town angrier. But the blue town is bigger and soon the red town people and the blue town people have babies and they are sometimes nice and sometimes mean because they have a little of both in them. They are purple.” A + M
Sometimes you feel shyness. There is someone and they do something and you get to know them and you feel, “I need to get this shyness out of me.” It feels like you go from small to bigger. A + J
“A relationship starts out small and gets bigger and bigger until it is like it explodes and then it starts over when you meet more people and make more friendships.” N + S
You are thinking about meeting this person and you sometimes feel nervous. "I want to/I don’t want to. I’m feeling nervous." Then there is this “poof!” and you make a friend. P + I
This is what is happening inside. It’s crazy, you’re like, oh my gosh, and sometimes you feel scared like “What if she doesn’t like me?” U + S
Friendship is wild, it’s graceful, it’s beautiful. A + M + S